Blog: Thinking Out Loud

Musings on (Magento) Life, the (.NET) Universe and Everything (IT)

The Pre-Imagine Magento Hackathon

So finally, team RLTSquare is in Las Vegas to attend Magento Imagine 2016. While the conference will officially kick off tomorrow on Monday morning, there were a lot of Pre-Imagine activities over the weekend. I had a chance to attend the hackathon-docathon event, and it was absolutely amazing!

Fabrizio Branca was the host and coordinator. To break the ice, he started us off with a really fun game: there were a bunch of XKCD comics which were cut in three parts, each handed out to someone at random. We searched for our comic partners and then spent 20 minutes to get to know each other better. We even drew pictures of each other and then introduced each other to the room. What a fun way to get to know new people!

The Magento Artists

Next, we spent a while gathering ideas for coding and doc-ing. In 30 minutes, the room managed to come up with a lot of great ideas. We then paired off into teams based on whatever thing we wanted to work on and spent the whole weekend coding and typing away.

Overall, it was a lot of fun. The ‘community’ side of the Magento philosophy was quite evident in the way everyone was working. I spent a lot of time fixing some issues on my friend’s environment. I got a lot of help in issues that I was having while I was coding. In between, I even got to have a one-on-one with the legendary Alan Kent. He not only took the time to (very patiently) answer all of my (somewhat) stupid questions, but also went into a lot of details into explaining the details of using docker and vagrant. But that’s a discussion for a separate blog post altogether.